Red Queen Creative's labour market expertise

By Finbarr Wilson

Red Queen is a marketing and communications company. We do a number of things, including writing, editing, photography and design, which you may already know. But did you know we’re also Labour Market Experts? 

If you don’t know what labour market experts are the term may sound almost academic and may even conjure up images of the nerds from The Big Bang Theory sitting at their desks all day working on Excel documents.

Sure labour market information includes numbers, like statistics and unemployment rates, that may happen to sometimes go in Excel documents. But it’s a lot more than that. Labour market information takes a variety of information about our working (and non-working) population and makes it practical, looking into the future and planning for workforce needs.

Most people don’t think about things like demographics and industry needs, but this information is important and is becoming more important in the coming years. Why? Because in case you haven’t heard or noticed, we have an aging population. We have a huge number of baby boomers that are set to retire over the next 10 years. Given the demographics of people who watch blogs like this, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say these baby boomers are your parents or bosses. And guess what? When they leave who is going to replace them?

Information like this can help prepare our workforce for future needs. Governments can introduce programs targeting key workforce shortages, schools will know what kinds of programs to develop or focus on for the future, small businesses can stay ahead of their competition by starting their succession plans. Job seekers can find information on what kinds of jobs are in demand so they have a better chance of being gainfully employed.

Take the oil and gas industry here in Alberta for example. This industry is facing major labour shortages in a LOT of occupations. If you haven’t heard about it visit the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada website, that recently released a report revealing the oil and gas industry will need to increase its workforce by over 70% by 2021.

If no one fills these positions oil and gas will not be produced or shipped, which means major economic effects across North America.

And with Canada, particularly Alberta, bracing for another economic boom, our advice to you, whether you are a student, an employer or a job seeker, would be to start checking out labour marketing information before it hits.

Here are some great resources to check out:

•  A great new LMI web page at http://www.labourmarkettrends.com/ covers all aspects of about labour market news in Canada.

• The Government of Alberta has a great site: Occinfo.com. This site offers tons of information for job seekers on where the jobs are, details on the jobs and even pay. You can search jobs by title, interest, subject or industry.

•  The Government of Canada releases a Labour Force Survey every month. The survey covers employment and unemployment numbers broken down by province and industry.

•   Each of Canada’s industries has its own labour council, and they churn out some excellent LMI. Find your sector council here http://www.councils.org/sector-councils/list-of-canadas-sector-councils/. 

•  And of course, there are newspapers, chambers of commerce and even workmates.